Spaeth reflects on John Mackey

Hello everyone. I'm jumping on Phil Miller's blog here to post an item about former Gophers tight end Matt Spaeth, who reflected on the death of Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey.

Spaeth won the Mackey Award in 2006 as college football's top tight end. Spaeth, a free agent who played his first four NFL seasons for the Pittsburgh Steelers, met and spent time with Mackey at the awards ceremony in New York after his senior season with the Gophers.

I talked to Spaeth after his workout at the Gophers football complex on Thursday.

"Man, what an awesome guy and an incredible player," Spaeth said. "I had heard of him but I had never really seen anything on him until I won the award and did some research. I mean, he was just the most incredible player. He was like a man amongst boys. He did everything. He would just run over people. He would run by, around and over everybody."

"His wife is just incredible," Spaeth said. "Unfortunately she had to do lot of caretaking with him and different things because of his health. She's just incredible. I've tried to keep in touch a little bit through emails here and there with her. She's an incredible woman."

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Randy Johnson has been covering college football in one form or another since the early 1990s. He was the Star Tribune’s main college football editor on the copy desk for nearly two decades before returning to reporting in August 2017 as the beat writer for Gophers football. Randy has covered a Rose Bowl (Joe Paterno’s 1994 Penn State team), and he covered a John Gutekunst-coached Gophers team that missed out on the 1990 Weed-Eater Bowl. Email Randy to talk about the Gophers.